


I want to see the rain

by captainofthegreenpeas



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Death, Established Relationship, F/M, Freak weather, Grieving, Heavensdew, I will sail this goddamn ship solo if I have to, Illness, Loss, Post Mockingjay, Rarepair, She adored him, and he was devoted to her, bereavement, book canon, deep love and devotion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-22 02:43:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12471688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainofthegreenpeas/pseuds/captainofthegreenpeas
Summary: Grief is the price we pay for love.86 ADD: Plutarch dies at the age of 57. Fulvia, his only family, seeks consolation.





	I want to see the rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cocohorse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cocohorse/gifts).



_Grief is the price we pay for love_. Over and over again Fulvia had had to tell herself that. _Yet I pay up every time; and I call it a bargain_.

Asha. Piso. Remus. Cinna. Castor. Messalla. Plutarch. They had all left her now, one way or another; and when they did, they took a piece of her heart with them. _I can’t keep doing this_ , she thought. _By the time I die, there’ll be nothing left of me_. Each time her heart healed, Fulvia changed. She smiled a little less easily, laughed a little less readily, remembered a little more sharply. Asha was first, to teach her that everything good can be taken away again. Piso had been what she had imagined a father might be like. Castor and Messalla… she did not dare to ask Pollux and Cressida how they had died, when the three of them had mourned together, to ease the worst of the pain. Part of her couldn’t bear to bring herself to ask, to know. Cinna… nobody who knew him could have been unaffected by that act of slaughter. Her grief had kindled her anger, just as it had when Remus was pulled away from her. It was easier, to be angry. It hurt, but it helped. It gave her a purpose, a goal. If she torn down the monsters that had taken them from her, maybe, just maybe, the pain could go away.

But Plutarch… Plutarch… This could have been so much worse, Fulvia reminded herself at the beginning of every day. He could have been murdered, like Finnick. He could have been tortured, like Peeta. He could have been killed in front of her, like Coin. She could have been left pregnant, like Annie. She could have lost him after only a brief stretch of time, like Johanna. None of those things, which would have magnified this pain tenfold, ever happened. Her suffering was a drop compared to the oceans others before her had endured. Well. More like a lake. Perhaps this wasn’t the most effective way of soothing yourself, to think that this was not the worst it could be.

Fulvia needed so much to remember him, to remember every little thing, to keep Plutarch as close to her as possible, to preserve their happiness, her home; but remembering only reminded her that he had gone.

The summer he died was a big fetid blotch in her past. She was sure it was one of the worst of her life; and considering that summer was the season the Hunger Games used to take place every year, that was something. It had started with a dense, searing heatwave that had sledgehammered Plutarch’s health. Nothing seemed to help.

“I’m so tired,” he said over and over again. “I’m so tired.”

Yet he never slept, no matter what the doctors did. Plutarch had been ill before, everyone feels sick once in a long while, but it had always turned him bad-tempered and frustrated and more defiant than ever. He had never looked so defeated. Fulvia tried to take care of him, tried everything she could think of, but she had problems of her own. Her period raged rampant, leaving her feeling disgusted and humiliated as well as terrified and too, too hot.

 _When did I get so weak?_ She had thought. _I survived conspiracies, atrocities, tyrannical enemies, a revolution, a war. How can the weather make me want to die?_ The hottest recorded temperatures since the apocalypse; and the death toll was starting to spiral. When rumours started that both harvest and water tables were under threat, Fulvia thought it was the end of days. The threat of unrest began to creep up. President Loxley had convened a committee to organise rationing. Plutarch had ranted and raved about needing to be there, for the first time in days something mattered to him, but he was bedridden and for all his eloquence and erudition, his sentences were unravelling.

 _What do I do?_ Fulvia had despaired. _If he goes, it’ll kill him. If he stays home, that could kill him too_. Each day he could do less.

“Please” was all she ended up saying, all day. Please do this. Drink this. Eat this. Please get better.

“Fulvia?” He said at last. “It starts at midnight.”

He said no more.

When Plutarch finally died, it was almost too much. Even weeping was beyond her. You needed water for that. Summer had set her afire with pain, but winter sucked the life out of her. It was too cold now, though nowhere near as extreme as the heat had been. In one spurt of irony, the water pipes froze over. The death toll was still high, but lower than before. A mild Fall had given Panem a second chance.

She had stared at the clock on New Year’s Eve. After days of watching over Plutarch, she was left exhausted, but sleeping in a bed was still impossible. Fulvia had spent the last- four, five thousand nights falling asleep to the soft flutter of his heartbeat. Every time she lay down, she waited for the shuffle-stomp pattern of his footsteps, the creak of bedsprings when he sat down, the turn to lift his legs in and the arm reaching out to pull her closer. She could tell herself all night that those sounds would stay silent, but still she waited.  

So Fulvia caught a few hours here and there instead, at the dinner table, in her armchair, even once on the subway, which she had never done before in her life.   _Please don’t let it happen_ , she had thought, at 23:59. _Let the next year never come. Please. No._ She had tried to push against it, even though she knew it was hopeless.

When 00:00 had wiped clean the screen, Fulvia mourned another loss. No matter what, they had always shared a time period, a space of existence. All her life, even in the years when his name was unknown or meant nothing to her, they had shared a time. No more. Every year that was gone was another year between them, pushing them further apart. Time healed nothing. Time made her miss him even more.

One day, simply for her own peace of mind, Fulvia had managed to banish Plutarch completely from it. She had taken care not to think of him once all day. But in the late afternoon she walked along the street and saw someone who from behind looked so like him that- that she forgot-

 _We had time_ , she thought. Their own sweet period of peace had lasted and lasted. She wanted it to be longer, of course she did, if they had lived together a thousand years she would still ask for more days with him, but not a single day of their time together had been wasted.

The day the spring rains started in earnest, she was rummaging through some drawers. She had been as stubborn as a mule when it came to the idea of parting with any of his things, least of all his books. One time, she had managed to bring herself to give away a pair of his shoes to a friend, only to attend a dinner party at the friend’s house the next day and finding herself stealing them back. There were some folders, diagrams and notebooks at the bottom, so she scooped them out and began to sort them into piles. Most of his histories had been published to surprising popularity, given his past occupation. He had planned the outline of another history, but judging by the dates at the top of the page, he had been interrupted. She began to look for corresponding material to the plans and began to make some notes. _I need to go back to work_ , she thought. She had meant to before, she just couldn’t summon the energy. That night, Fulvia crawled into bed and made a small igloo out of the covers. She felt a small shred of her old self peaking through, her better self. _More adventures await_ , she promised. _I can feel better. I can’t do anything to help Plutarch anymore, but I can take care of myself. The past was happy, not perfect. I can’t and shouldn’t go back there. Tomorrow will be kinder to me._

Hugging her pillow, she rolled into a ball and went to sleep.


End file.
